Your search results for "Analytics"

Measuring social media ROI can be a daunting task, but Google Analytics can help. Gauge the effectiveness of your social media strategy using these four data points in Google Analytics.

Many real estate businesses struggle with measuring social media ROI. Even for seasoned content marketers, the collection of data is one of the most daunting tasks. But it’s important to get it right, for several reasons:

To understand how your strategy is working.

To determine where changes need to be made.

To allocate appropriate resources.

Don’t waste time trying to track down information on your various social accounts to measure social media ROI when you can find the most pertinent information with a single tool. The best part is: You’re probably already using it. (And it’s free!)

You need data to measure social media ROI

Google Analytics is an incredible tool for businesses large and small looking to gain insight into the who, when, and where of their web traffic. And while it may seem intimidating to the novice, it’s very easy to use once you know where to find what you’re looking for.

Here’s how to start gauging the effectiveness of your social media strategy — and measure social media ROI for real estate.

Step 1: Look at where your traffic is coming from.

How much of your traffic is coming from social media? Google Analytics will provide an overview of the overall traffic sources that deliver visitors to your website, including traffic from social media. This high-level view of your traffic includes:

Search (people clicking through from Google or Bing)

Social (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Direct (people typing your site in their browser or bookmarks)

Referral (people clicking links from other sites to get to you)

Email

Paid search

Other

To access this report in Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Go a step further and review the volume of traffic that comes from specific social media networks, by clicking on Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals.

It’s important to have a diverse mix of traffic sources, which should be reflected in the traffic sources report. If a large portion of your traffic comes exclusively from one source, especially if that source is not social media, it is time to reconsider your social media strategy. Similarly, if one network is driving most of your traffic, you should examine when and what you are posting in the non-performing channels.

Step 2: Determine revenue derived from posts.

Make sure to include links back to your site when you post on social mediaso thatGoogle Analytics can track and analyze them. You’ll want to add a UTM code (aka UTM parameter), which is text added to the end of a URL (after the “?”) to identify the success of a campaign. As an example, the UTM code is in boldface below:

You can set unique UTMs for all of your social media, per channel, or even per update. By analyzing your different UTM parameters, you can determine which URLs are most effective in driving users to your content.

Set UTM parameters through Google’s URL Builder.Once your parameters are set, you can go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns to see the revenue from any individual UTM tag, like a post or tweet.

Step 3: Look at how your content is being digested.

Analytics allows you to see how long a visitor stayed on your site, (use the Duration goal to find out). Examine how content and properties resonate with the social media audience by using Set up the Pages/Screens per Session goal or learn how many times visitors from social media play website video with Create an Event goal for specific tracking.

Step 4: What is social media bringing you in conversions?

Google Analytics has conversion funnel reports that show how much social media is contributing to conversions. To set up conversion funnels in Google Analytics:

These four insights from Google Analytics can help you determine how effective your social media strategy is in terms of traffic, direct revenue, visitor behavior, and conversions. Use this information to continually measure social media ROI and refine your strategy to get the most out of your social media presence for your brand and properties.

Your search results for "Analytics"

Google Analytics is an extremely effective tool for real estate marketers to gain insights and shape strategy. These four tips will help get you started.

Highlights:

Start by choosing what metrics to track.

Figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Paint a picture of your audience using hard data.

When it comes to gaining insights into real estate leads, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools out there right now. This robust, comprehensive, analytical tool determines how web users are interacting with your digital assets, including social media. The data that Google Analytics for real estate provides gives you invaluable insights into how your audience is interacting with your content, as well as how your content is performing over time.

Because this tool is extremely comprehensive, the options can be overwhelming at first glance. Understanding how to properly deploy this resource, and the metrics it provides, is your best bet for delivering value to your target audience, and effectively nurturing leads.

Here are four steps to get your marketing efforts started using Google Analytics for real estate.

1. Decide which metrics to track and identify key metrics

When you first start using Google Analytics, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices available to you for analyzing your real estate website visitors’ activity. It can seem tempting to track every available metric, gaining huge amounts of data. But your time and resources are much better spent if you take a step back and identify the right marketing reports for your real estate business.

Once you’ve chosen which metrics your real estate business should be tracking, it’s time to identify two or three metrics that will be your touchstones. These are the metrics that are critically important to the performance of your website and should monitored and analyzed regularly.

2. Start with the big things

Is there a page on your website that gets a large amount of traffic? That’s where you should be concentrating. Use key metrics to determine why that content is specifically intriguing to your users, and what led visitors to click and spend time there. For example, if one piece of content on your site outperforms another, ask yourself questions like:

Does a higher click-through rate correlate with timing of emails sharing the content, social media posts, etc.?

What are the top traffic sources for high performing content?

How long are users spending on your content?

You get the picture. In short, if you identify the right questions to ask, Google Analytics for real estate will offer you the data to answer them—in turn giving you the tools to optimize your digital assets.

3. Find out where your website traffic is coming from

In a perfect world, users are visiting your site from multiple sources, instead of a single or just a few traffic streams. Gaining an understanding of where your traffic is coming from lets you devote resources to top-performing sources and adjust your efforts where they aren’t gaining optimal results.

Select “Overview” under the “Acquisition” menu to determine how much of your traffic is organic, social, from referrals, etc. The Channel Report will give you further details on where your visitors are coming from, as well as information about how traffic from various sources engages with your site.

4. Build an audience profile

Ultimately, one of the most important things Google Analytics can capture for you is a picture of your audience. This includes where they’re located, how they engage with your website, demographic data like age, and other buyer preferences. Some key audience characteristics to be on the lookout for:

How much of your audience is new visitors vs. returning visitors?

What devices is your audience using to access your digital assets?

Where are your visitors geographically located?

The more you use the data to understand your audience, the more you’ll be able to optimize your digital assets to meet their needs and build and expand your audience base.

The bottom line

Google Analytics is your superpower when it comes to real estate marketing. No other tool gives you more comprehensive insights into your audience behavior, content performance, overall site performance, and more. Start using this tool today, and let data drive your real estate marketing efforts.

Your search results for "Analytics"

Measuring content marketing success for real estate can seem like a daunting task. Our top 3 blog posts on analytics and ROI will keep you on track.

We talk a lot here at Fronetics Real Estate about the importance of a data-driven approach when it comes to measuring content marketing success for real estate. Without a documented strategy, your efforts are likely to be scattershot and aimless. To grow your business strategically, you need to track your efforts, analyze successes and failures, and determine ROI.

This year, we’ve focused on analytics and ROI several times on our blog. Measuring content marketing success can often seem daunting, so we’ve aimed to share some tools that work for us. We’ve discussed why it’s important to benchmark your content marketing efforts against competitive properties, published a guide for real estate marketers to measure that ever-elusive brand awareness, and offered up a monthly marketing reporting template to help you track the right metrics.

Here are our top three most read analytics and ROI posts for 2018.

Traditional real estate marketing involved a lot of “post and pray.” That is, marketers would place ads in local publications, on billboards, and with other traditional media outlets and hope that buyers and tenants would read them and take interest.

When people are searching the internet for apartments or condos, what are they seeing? Part of an effective, data-driven marketing strategy is regularly taking the time to benchmark real estate marketing against competitive properties.

We all know that competition drives results. Take Elaine Thompson and Michael Phelps. In August 2016, Thompson claimed the title of the world’s fastest woman, and Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian of all time. They achieved these incredible feats by continuously pushing themselves to do better — and they weren’t just tracking and measuring their personal performance. Read more.

3. How to Measure Brand Awareness: A Guide for Real Estate Marketers

When it comes to selling property — particularly luxury properties — growing brand awareness is an important goal. Prospective buyers need to know that your property exists and that it can provide the kind of lifestyle that they’re looking for.

Measuring how well you’re doing at getting the word out about your brand and property/properties is critical to optimizing your marketing strategy. But measuring brand awareness can be tricky. Read more.

A final word

Thank you for making us your go-to source for real estate content marketing insights. Please join us in 2019 to learn the latest on measuring content marketing success and everything else you need to grow your real estate business.

Your search results for "Analytics"

Determine when and where your target buyers are online to find the optimal time to post on social media.

Social media has changed the landscape for doing business, particularly when it comes to real estate. With the click of a button, companies are able to instantly communicate with untapped markets and potential buyers and tenants. Face-to-face interactions are often overshadowed by live streaming videos, tweets, chats, and likes. For real estate sales and rentals, the possibilities for social media marketing are virtually endless.

But it’s not enough to curate content for your social media platforms. Today’s social media users expect fresh, innovative ideas around the clock. And when this content is being shared is just as valuable as what is being shared.

There’s a lot of research out there that highlights the optimal time to post on various social media platforms. For example, marketing analytics software provider TrackMaven has published its Best Times to Post on Social Media Cheat Sheet, which breaks down posting by industry, brand, and product. It also offers general dates and times that can boost success.

But the truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all social media posting solution.

You need to take it one step further. You need to know the best time for your unique property to post content. You want more than just a general idea of when to post. You want specific information about your target buyers and tenants — when they’re actively scrolling, reading, watching, and liking your content.

As you get a sense for when your target audience is most likely to interact with your content, be sure to keep in mind the ideal frequency for real estate companies to post to each social media platform.

Determining the best time to post on social media

There’s a broad range of tools available that will analyze the personal data of your social media followers and help you compute the best time to post on social media. Here are four that we think offer the most useful information and are easy to use.

1) Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that can do everything from scheduling social media posts to measuring your social media ROI. The AutoSchedule feature lets Hootsuite determine the best time to publish a post or tweet based on when similar content performed well in the past. It also considers the platform and can publish the same message at different times based on audience engagement on each particular network.

2) Tweriod

Tweriod, a free Twitter tool that helps you know the best time to tweet, is changing the way companies approach their marketing tweets. It will evaluate up to 1,000 of your followers and their tweeting patterns, including schedule, interests, and retweets. You then receive an analysis of when your tweets will receive the most exposure.

3) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust analytical tool for determining how web users are interacting with your digital assets, including social media. Three custom reports (Best Days to Post on Social Media, Best Time to Post on Social Network by Hour, and the Social Media Traffic by Date and Hour) offer real-time, in-depth insight. Best of all, Google Analytics is free!

4) SproutSocial

SproutSocial offers a customized dashboard with a quick overview of how your social media channels are performing. You also can gain deeper insight into your customers — like gender and age demographics, crucial information for real estate marketing. And you can assess your customer reach and what will work in your favor.

Creating a strong social media presence is essential for any property. But having a presence is just a starting point in understanding how to fully optimize these ever-changing platforms to work for you.

Using online tools to analyze when and where your content should be posted will enhance the value of your social media efforts. In short, you have the best chance of generating leads and closing deals by pushing your content through the right avenues at the right time.

We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether renting a new property or launching a social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: not all metrics are created equal.

So-called vanity metrics are measurements that have no bearing on your bottom line but can give you an inflated sense of success. Generally, they are easy to calculate but are influenced by too many factors — and are too vulnerable to random external events — to be reliable.

Website visits and number of subscribers are two classic examples. A spike in homepage hits may be the result of your marketing efforts, or it may be because of ghost spam. (Or both.) Regardless, more visits do not necessarily correlate to increased revenue — just more visits. In the same vein, having 100,000 email subscribers means nothing if only 1% are opening them. You actually could be losing money in terms of resources allocated if the emails aren’t helping drive sales.

Investment vs. vanity metrics

That’s why it’s crucial to focus on return on investment instead of vanity metrics. You could waste hours reviewing a hundred different analytics that tell you nothing about how revenue was affected by a particular effort. Or, worse, you could use vanity metrics to justify decisions that don’t achieve their ROI.

As a simplified example: say you spend $1,000 on a display ad for a new apartment complex targeting established professionals on a local news website, and your analytics report that 100 people clicked through. This sounds like success! But don’t celebrate just yet. When you dig past the vanity metric, you find an extremely high bounce rate. That means most of those click-throughs left your site immediately, neither engaging with your property nor moving any closer to becoming a tenant. In fact, you find that only one click-through converts. Was it worth paying $1,000 for this one potential tenant? Probably not.

But say you ran another $1,000 display ad, one that targets a younger audience than you think your property fits. Only 20 visitors clicked through, which sounds less successful than the other ad. But when you follow those 20 click-throughs, you find that 5 ended up renting units, meaning the ad pays for itself many times over. You’ve also learned that perhaps a younger audience is more suited than you thought to your property. The ROI proves that the vanity metric was quite misleading in this case.

Metrics that help you make decisions

Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis, who coined the term vanity metrics, said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.

While vanity metrics tell you nothing about your bottom line, ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively. Tracking a vanity metric like number of followers, which is likely to build over time regardless, gives you no indication of which experiments were successful and which weren’t.

Your resources are limited, so it’s crucial to evaluate your efforts with meaningful numbers that illustrate their effect on your bottom line. Calculating ROI might take some time — both in the few extra minutes to do the math and the amount of time that needs to pass before all the data is available — but that number will be infinitely more valuable to you than any vanity metric on your Google Analytics report.